Hard disk shortage will get worse: Piper Jaffray

The scarcity of hard drives will only get worse in the coming weeks and months, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "We could run out of drives by the end of November," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard said in an interview this week while discussing the shortage in the wake of the severe flooding in Thailand, where half of the world's production of HDD's takes place.

Richard added prices quoted anywhere from up to 10 to up 60 percent. There is a demand of about 180 million drives for the fourth quarter but only 100 to 120 million will ship, according to Richard. That means we could lose 5 to 10 million PC units in the fourth quarter.